Donald Trump played the identity politics game – and won

Trump seems to have survived by refusing to submit when his opponents took offence and attempted to shame him into backing down, a tactic that has been hugely successful against conservatives in the past.

But Trump is also the triumph of identity politics. For years the punditry have been saying that the GOP is finished because America is becoming more diverse, failing to see that since the Democrats win through identity politics, then Republicans could also play that game. Back in 2000 the blogger Steve Sailer observed that the Republicans could win with the low-hanging fruit of a white middle-class increasingly alienated by the Democratic Party’s ‘coalition of the fringes’, and he seems to have been proved right.